The Resurrection of

Jesus

Historical Event or Theological Explanation? A Dialogue – N.T. Wright and John Dominic Crossan 2007 Easter Small-Group Home-Study Animated by Canon Jim Irvine

Tuesday morning series 9:30 A.M. – 11:00 A.M. Tuesday evening series 7:00 P.M. – 8:30 P.M. April 10, 17, 24, May 1 and 8

OPENING STATEMENT: N.T. Wright.............................................................................1 OPENING STATEMENT: John Dominic Crossan...........................................................7 DIALOGUE: N.T. Wright and John Dominic Crossan ...............................................12 Holy Communion under Special Circumstances......................................................26 The Resurrection of Jesus Christ by John Dominic Crossan and B.T. Wright is available through Anglican House, 115 Princess Street, Saint John, N.B.

EASTER HOME-STUDY SERIES 2007

OPENING STATEMENT N. T Wright 1 Thank you all for being here this evening and for coming to this extraordinary weekend. I am very grateful to the seminary and to Bob Stewart, who, as he said, has been after me for five years to do this, and for the chance to participate in this first Greer-Heard PointCounterpoint Forum and, of course, as we have already said, to the sponsors themselves. I am grateful, too, to Dom Crossan for his willingness to go once more round the tracks in this debate. Dom and I have had several enjoyable and, I hope, fruitful discussions over the last decade and more, and my respect and affection for Dom have steadily increased through that. I have been fascinated to see the ways in which our thinking has converged at some points while remaining firmly divergent at others. 2 So my primary task in this session this evening, as I understand it, is to outline briefly the argument which I have set out in my book The Resurrection of the Son of God, which was published nearly two years ago. The book has, of course, a positive role, but one of its main tasks, if I can put it like this, was to negate the negative—that is, to show that the normal historical proposals about the rise of resurrection faith in the early church, the normal proposals that try to explain things without the actual bodily resurrection of Jesus, simply won’t work historically. 3 I see what I was doing as primarily a ground-clearing task, sweeping away the rubble and debris behind which bad arguments had been hiding. Thus, for instance, I have shown against Gerd Lüdemann that the idea of resurrection is not something which ancient people could accept easily because they didn’t know the laws of nature, whereas we moderns, with post-Enlightenment science, have now discovered that resurrection can’t be true. That is simply absurd. From Plato to Homer, from Aeschylus to Pliny, the ancients knew perfectly well that dead people didn’t rise. We didn’t need modern science to tell us that. I’ve shown against Greg Riley that ancient pagan stories about people eating with the dead, or seeing the dead in realistic visions and so on, are completely different from the idea of resurrection, and that the same ancient pagans who knew all about visions and the like continued to reject resurrection with some scorn. I’ve shown against Kathleen Corley that the Hellenistic novels which feature stories of empty graves and so on cannot provide an explanatory context for the rise of Christian belief. And I’ve shown against many writers that in Judaism as in paganism, the word resurrection was not a general term for life after death, as it is often used today, to our shame in some Christian circles. Rather, the word resurrection always denoted the second stage in a two-stage process of what happens after death: the first stage being nonbodily and the second being a renewed bodily existence, what I have often called life after “life after death.” Likewise, I’ve shown conclusively that Paul really did believe in the bodily resurrection, despite generations of critics going back as far as the second century who tried to make out that he didn’t. 4 I have, I think, demolished the central thesis of the influential 1981

1

SBL [Society of Biblical Literature] presidential address by James Robinson—namely, that the early Christian experience of the risen Jesus was an experience of some kind of luminosity which could be interpreted as what we would call an essentially private religious experience rather than evidence for an occurrence in the public world and which developed rather slowly into a belief in bodily resurrection, on the one hand, and into gnostic theology, on the other. I’ve shown that we can’t account for early Christian faith by suggesting that stories about appearances and stories about an empty tomb have nothing whatever to do with one another. I have shown that the idea of resurrection faith being generated by some kind of cognitive dissonance simply doesn’t work. And I believe I’ve shown against Dom and others that the early Christian belief in the resurrection of Jesus could not have been generated from the combination of their previous knowledge of Jesus and their study of particular biblical texts, however much both of those things contributed to their interpretation of the event once it had happened. 5 Now the point to all this negative exercise, I stress, is not first and foremost to prove the resurrection by modernist or supposedly neutral or naturalistic historiography. The point is rather to force the question back where it ought to be rather than allowing yet another generation of students to be taught that the Easter stories and the Gospels are simply mythical back projections of early Christian consciousness rather than accounts of something exceedingly strange and unprecedented in the real world. Now I appreciate that in some circles this task may seem otiose. So, say people who have never taken history particularly seriously, why should you worry what historical critics and exegetes are saying and thinking? But for the seminarian in college and the parishioner in the pew, it matters a great deal. Enormous forces in our culture are determined to deny Jesus was raised from the dead. And, over and over again, they use arguments which can be shown to be invalid, and they propose alternative scenarios about the rise of Christianity which can be shown to be impossible. And that, I think, is an important exercise in itself. 6 But my book is, I think, more than merely negative. Let me spell out its main positive argument. Perhaps the most original aspect of the book—I’m honestly not sure now, my head was so full of it—is its compilation of six Christian mutations within first-century Jewish resurrection belief. My case here is that we can track with considerable precision and over a wide range of early evidence a phenomenon so striking and remarkable that it demands a serious and well-grounded historical explanation. Early Christian belief in resurrection is clearly not something derived from any form of paganism; it is a mutation from within Judaism, or rather six mutations. First, belief in resurrection has moved from being a peripheral item of belief, as it is in Judaism, to the center. Second, the meaning of resurrection has been sharpened up. Jewish sources leave it vague as to what form the new body will take, but the early Christian sources, again and again, indicate that the body will be transformed into a new type of immortal physicality.

2

Third, there is no spectrum of belief in early Christianity on what happens after death, as there is in both Judaism and paganism; there were many different opinions out there. But from Paul through to Tertullian, there is development and reflection about what precisely resurrection would mean, and how to argue it before a skeptical audience. But they all, except the Gnostics and the semi-Gnostics, believe in resurrection. No Christians known to us retain signs of the other main beliefs of the period. Fourth, resurrection as an event has split into two. Those firstcentury Jews who expected the resurrection saw it as a single event, the raising to new bodily life of all at the very end. But it is central to Paul and, after him, to all other early Christian writers that the resurrection is now a two-stage event—or better, a single event taking place in two moments, as Paul puts it: Christ the first fruits, and then at his coming, those who belong to Him. Fifth, resurrection functions in a newly metaphorical way. Resurrection, the word or the concept, could be used in Judaism, as in Ezekiel 37, as a metaphor for the return from exile. That has disappeared in early Christianity. Instead, we find the term resurrection, still possessing its literal, bodily meaning, also functioning metaphorically, as in Romans 6 or Colossians 2 and 3 with reference to baptism and holiness. Sixth, nobody expected the Messiah to be raised from the dead, for the simple reason that nobody in Judaism at the time expected a Messiah who would die, especially one who would die shamefully and violently. But not only did the early Christians believe that the Messiah had been raised from the dead, they made the resurrection a key element in their demonstration that he was the Messiah, developing several brand-new exegetical arguments to make the point, particularly from the Psalms and Isaiah, as in Romans 1, Romans 15, Acts 2, and so forth. 7 These six mutations, which I have tracked in considerable detail across the book, lend weight to the pressing historical question, “What caused these mutations within Judaism, and why, and how?” And it isn’t difficult, then, to show that all the early Christians for whom we have evidence, and I have even argued that this would include Q people, supposing such people ever existed, would have given the answer that they really did believe that Jesus of Nazareth really had been bodily raised from the dead and that what they knew of the resurrection had precipitated these mutations. 8 Only when I have tracked all this in the book do I allow the reader to get into the resurrection narratives themselves. I sent a copy of this book, as I send everything that I write, to my parents. My father is in his middle eighties now, and he reads everything I write, bless him. He’s not a trained historian or theologian. And a few days later, I got a phone call from him saying, “I have just finished the book’ which is some feat within a week, seven hundred pages. He said, “I started to enjoy it about page six hundred.” The reason was he finally had been given permission to think about the resurrection narratives themselves, which was what he thought we were going to be doing all along. This delay in presenting the final chapters of the four Gospels,

3

not to mention the so-called Gospel of Peter, was quite deliberate, and I conceived it as a way of outflanking the begging of the question that has often taken place when people have assumed that they knew what resurrection might mean to early Christians and then projected that onto the narratives. 9 I eschew, to the dismay of some, any attempt at a tradition-history of the stories, since trying to write a tradition-history of the resurrection narratives presupposes that we know which elements in such stories must be early, whereas, in fact, we can only know such a thing with the help of an a priori belief about the development of resurrection belief in the early church. And such attempts, in my experience, routinely make the mistake of starting with the assumption of one or another of the revisionist schemes, whose foundations, as I have shown, are built upon quicksand. Instead, I draw attention to several features of the stories which demonstrate that they must be very early indeed even though they have been shaped and edited by the evangelists in their eventual writing down. Noting that even when they are telling the exact same story, the evangelists manage to use remarkably different words, making any theory of literary borrowing in the resurrection narratives very difficult. I point out that the stories, first, are remarkably free of scriptural quotation, illusion, and echo, and, second, that they give the women an extraordinarily prominent place, which has already disappeared by the time Paul writes 1 Corinthians 15. Third, they do not mention the future Christian hope, unlike almost all passages about Jesus’ resurrection elsewhere in early Christianity. Those of you who are going to preach on Easter Sunday, please note that the resurrection stories in the Gospels do not say Jesus is raised, therefore we’re going to heaven or therefore we’re going to be raised. They say Jesus is raised, therefore God’s new creation has begun and we’ve got a job to do. Very interesting. And, fourth, these stories convey, across all four accounts, a picture of Jesus himself which is neither that of a resuscitated corpse nor that of someone shining like a star—as in Daniel 12, which is the main biblical passage referred to in many Jewish discussions of resurrection—nor that of a ghost or a disembodied spirit, nor simply that of someone with the same kind of body that he had before. The same stories which speak of Jesus breaking bread, eating broiled fish, and inviting the disciples to touch him are those which also speak of his appearing and disappearing through locked doors, not being recognized instantly, and, finally, disappearing into God’s space, that is, heaven. Each of these features is extraordinary in itself, and it is all the more remarkable that all four of these features—no scriptural quotation, the place of the women, no mention of the future hope, and this very odd picture of Jesus—are sustained across the four Gospels despite their very different language and the obvious apparent surface inconsistencies. None of these four features can be explained, I’ve argued, if the stories are as late in origin even as the fifties, let alone as the seventies, eighties, or nineties, as some have persisted in arguing. 10 This analysis of the stories, then, sits alongside my analysis of the early Christian resurrection belief, and together they press the historical question “How can we best account for all these extraordinary

4

phenomena?” From this point on, I conclude the book with an argument, which still seems to me rock solid, that the empty tomb and the appearances of Jesus together constitute a sufficient condition for the rise of early Christian faith as we have studied it—that is to say, if Jesus did rise bodily and was seen not only having left an empty tomb but appearing in the garden and elsewhere, then this would offer a complete explanation of why the early Christians not only believed in his resurrection but told the stories the way they did and modified dramatically the basic Jewish resurrection belief. 11 I then go on to the more difficult argument that the empty tomb and the appearances constitute the necessary conditions for these phenomena. And here I appreciate that, if you take the phrase “necessary condition” in quite a strong sense, I do seem to be offering what some would call a “proof’ in some sense, of the resurrection. I perhaps should have made it clearer that I mean it in a somewhat weaker sense, namely, that having examined as many of the alternative explanations as I could find, and having shown them all to be completely inadequate, the one that we are left with, however unlikely, must press itself upon us as being true. 12 One last thing about the book, something which forms a bridge to the concerns which I know Dom Crossan and I both share: I’ve hinted throughout the book that resurrection was a politically revolutionary doctrine and that it remains so for the early Christians. I use as an epigraph for the last section of the book the lovely quotation from Oscar Wilde’s play Salome in which Herod Antipas hears by messengers about Jesus going around healing people, doing extraordinary things, and even raising the dead. It’s a wonderful moment in which Wilde has caught exactly the politically subversive nature of resurrection. Herod hears that Jesus is doing these extraordinary things, and he is quite happy to have somebody going around healing people, but then, “He raises the dead?” And the servant says, “Yes, sir, he raises the dead.” And Herod goes into bluster, “I do not wish Him to do that. I forbid Him to do that. I allow no man to raise the dead. This Man must be found and told that I forbid Him to raise the dead?” The tyrant knows that death is the last weapon he possesses, and if someone is raising the dead, everything is going to be turned upside down. 13 Now it is because Jesus had been raised from the dead that he was Messiah and Lord, the true King of the Jews and the true Lord of this world. However, resurrection has often been co-opted within post Enlightenment conservative Christianity into becoming part of a demonstration of the conservative modernist claim about supernaturalism over against the naturalism of the liberal modernist. I regard this as deeply misleading, not least because it has led those liberals who badly needed the resurrection as the ground for their proper social concern to reject it because it seems to them to be about mere pie in the sky. It is, in fact, (and I’ve hinted this throughout the book and have developed it in some of my other writings) only with the bodily resurrection of Jesus, demonstrating that his death dealt the decisive blow to evil, that we can find the proper ground for working to call the kingdoms of the earth to submit to the kingdom of God. That, I think, is the real reason for modernism’s shrill rejection of bodily

5

resurrection, exactly like the Sadducees, actually. Not that science has disproved Easter, but that Easter challenges the social and political pretensions of modernism, both right wing and left wing, and modernism knows it. Perhaps the most important thing then about the resurrection is also the most deeply counter-cultural in our own day— that a deeply orthodox theology about the resurrection, and a good deal else besides, is the proper seedbed of radical politics. And having thus kept you awake for my statutory twenty minutes, I shall allow room for Dom to take over. Thank you.

6

OPENING STATEMENT John Dominic Crossan 1 It is a very special honor to be part of this first Greer-Heard PointCounterpoint Forum, especially with Carolyn Greer and Bill Heard in the audience. It is also a privilege to speak on the subject of the resurrection of Christ. And, it is also an honor to be on the same podium as Tom. But Tom is now a bishop, and the last time, thirty-six years ago, I got into an argument with a bishop I was a priest and a monk and the bishop was the Cardinal Archbishop of Chicago. And, when the argument was over, I was an ex-priest and an ex-monk. It has never been clear to me who won that argument. 2 What I will be doing is talking through, not seven hundred pages, as Tom did, but a paper that Tom and other conference speakers already have. The title of the paper is “Mode and Meaning in Bodily Resurrection Faith”. And, to explain what I mean by “mode” and then by “meaning’ I am going to quote from Tom. It’s a little bit tongue in cheek. 3 Tom, from his book The Resurrection of the Son of God: To speak of someone going up to heaven by no means implied that the person concerned had (a) become a primitive space traveler and (b) arrived by that means at a different location within the present space-time universe. We should not allow the vivid, indeed, lurid language of the Middle Ages, or our many hymns and prayers which we use the term “heaven” to denote, it seems a far-off location within the cosmos we presently inhabit to make us imagine that first-century Jews thought literalistically in this way, too. Some, indeed, may have done so. There is no telling what things people will believe. But we should not imagine that the early Christians writers thought like that. 4 Now, this is a good way of introducing my terms mode and meaning. By mode, I mean the difference between something which is literal and something which is metaphorical (Jesus is a peasant, Jesus is the lamb of God), or between something which is actual or factual and something which is fictional or parabolic (the Good Samaritan, for example). That’s what I mean by mode. Is something literal or is something metaphorical? By meaning, which applies to both the literal and the metaphorical, I mean, “What are the implications of this for your life? What are they? What does this do for your life or for the world?” So, mode and meaning. 5 My first major point, and in a lot of this, I think, I am in very great agreement with Tom, is called “The Origin and Claim of Bodily Resurrection Faith in Jewish Tradition, in Christian Tradition.” My first point concerns cosmic transformation. If your faith tells you that God is just and the world belongs to God, and your experience dreadfully tells you that you’re a small, battered people, then eschatology is probably inevitable, and don’t let us scholars mystify you on it. Eschatology means if the world belongs to God, and is patently unjust, God must clean up the mess of the world. Eschatology is the Great, Divine Clean-Up of the world.

7

6 Furthermore, if you have an apocalypsis, a special revelation, about that eschatology, it has come to mean, but does not necessarily mean, the imminence of that eschatology. It could be about anything to do with it. So, apocalyptic eschatology, in itself, means simply that you are claiming to have some special revelation about this Great Divine Clean-Up. That’s always capital G, capital D, capital C, and capital U. Now this apocalyptic eschatology is the absolute—I was going to say background, foreground, matrix, everything to understand resurrection; without it, we’re not even talking about the same thing. I must caution you: please never say, and cross out when any scholar you find, including myself, has ever said, that this is the “end of the world.” We can dream of the end of the world because we can do it. We can do it atomically, biologically, chemically, demographically, ecologically— and we’re only up to e! No first-century Jew or Christian would think about the end of the world, because that would mean that God had annulled creation, which God would never do. God had created the world and said and stamped every day of it as good, good, very good. The end of the world is not what we are talking about. We’re talking about cosmic transformation of this world from a world of evil and injustice and impurity and violence into a world of justice and peace and purity and holiness. 7 Second major point, and I’m presuming cosmic transformation: bodily resurrection. Why would something so counterintuitive be involved? A general reason and a special reason. The general reason: if you are going to have a cosmic transformation of this world and not its evacuation into heaven, then you have to have, to use Tom’s word, transformed physicality. How else can you have a transformed world? But the specific reason—and I think Tom agrees with this— is the martyrs at the time of the Maccabean revolt and persecution. Where is the justice of God when you’re looking at the tortured bodies of martyrs? Bodies of martyrs. All of that is already in the Jewish tradition. And, as Tom has insisted, it’s in the Pharisaic subdivision of that. 8 Now, concerning Christian tradition, I like very much Tom’s word mutation. We are dealing with a mutation. What we must realize is how profoundly different everything is after a mutation, even though the people who are involved in it will probably try to think of it as not quite so great. What is the mutation? This is it: the Christian mutation, that which is most creatively, profoundly new about the Christian claim—this doesn’t prove it right, but this is at least what is new—is that the general bodily resurrection was not just imminent but had already begun. I suppose if you had asked a Pharisee about it, he would have said, “Well, it will be a blinding flash of light in the future.” Now the unbelievably creative mutation is that, no, it will have a beginning and it will have an end. And, of course, they console themselves by saying that there won’t be much time in between. Mutations are hard to live with. It will have a beginning, it will have an end, and nobody has said that before. Tom’s way of putting that is a question of how you explain that. How does somebody come up with something like this? I think that he is absolutely right that it requires a historical explanation. It’s a historical question. Where did they come up with it? As he has just told us, his own view is that two

8

things are the necessary and sufficient causes: the finding of the empty tomb and the apparitions and visions of the risen Lord. Put together, those things explain it historically. 9 My disagreement with this is rather profound. That could get you to exaltation; it could get you to the conclusion that Jesus has been exalted, maybe even to the right hand of God. (By the way, remember, if Jesus is at the right hand of God, then God is to the left of Jesus.) My point is not to debate either the empty tomb or the apparitions, but to say I think something else is absolutely needed to make that leap of faith, if you will. It is that the historical Jesus, that Jesus himself, had already said the same thing in different language, namely, that the kingdom of God was not just future, nor even imminent, but had already started. So I see the language of Jesus about the kingdom and the language of Paul about the resurrection, as exactly isomorphic. They fit upon one another. So, for me, it is important that Jesus had already said that the kingdom has begun. Without that, I do not see how to get to resurrection—exaltation, yes; resurrection, no—because, precisely as Tom has argued, it is such a huge mutation. 10 But there is a second equally important mutation. As soon as you say, “it has begun’ and there is a span of time, even if you think it is a short period—and we know it’s at least two thousand years and counting—there is a second thing. Jesus said, and I think that Paul takes for granted, that we’re dealing with what I’m going to call a collaborative eschaton. And nobody had ever suggested that either. If you are going to have eschatology as a blinding flash of divine light, then it would be silly to say, “Please, what’s my job?” Your job is to be very quiet, stay very holy, and pray—and wait. If you have, now, this period in between the beginning and the end, the first fruits and the harvest—the full harvest—then you have a job to do. And that is inevitable. So I want very much to watch what is in between that we are called to participate in—eschatology. And nobody had ever said that before. I take very seriously, for example, when Paul talks about unveiled faces seeing the glory of God, being transformed. Something is happening in between. It’s not as if you had two magnificent, transcendental bookends: one, the resurrection of Jesus; the other, the resurrection of everyone; and in between you have no books. 11 My second major point is mode and meaning. I want to draw attention to something which is, I think, necessary. If you are coming out of Pharisaic understanding of general resurrection, if you are coming out of that matrix, then you would have to have something like what we call the harrowing or robbing of hell. In scholarship we can get into an argument whether that comes in early or late. I can’t see how it could not be early, almost even if there’s no evidence of it, because how could you think of the general resurrection beginning only with Jesus? Where are the Maccabean martyrs? Where is the justice of God for the backlog? If your claim is that God has begun the Great Clean-Up of the world, then the first thing God has to pay attention to is the backlog of injustice. Jesus was not the first Jew to die on a Roman cross, nor would he be the last. There was a backlog. So, for me, I think the harrowing of hell has to be given much, much, much more attention than Tom does. But—I will actually admit this—it is

9

very much the harrowing of hell, that is, Jesus going down into Hades to liberate, not to give a sermon, not to preach, but to proclaim, “We’re out of here!”; to proclaim to all those who had died before him their liberation from bondage, that I have great trouble seeing literally. Let me admit it. If I take that literally, that means that I think that the people who said it were literal. Then there would be hundreds of empty tombs around Jerusalem. It wouldn’t be a matter of checking out one on Easter Sunday, but seeing how many empty ones. So I will concede that maybe I like the harrowing of hell, at least I place a lot of emphasis on it, and Tom does not, in the book at least. If you take the harrowing of hell, I think it will push you toward the metaphorical. If you don’t talk about it, you might just be talking about Jesus’ raising, and that is much easier to take literally. 12 Why is it important for me to speak of the metaphorical? Is it the Enlightenment? No, it really isn’t—because I am in a pre-Enlightenment age when I am reading this. It really is this: if you look at the world in which Jesus and Paul lived, the world in which Caesar, Caesar Augustus, was divine, was Son of God, was God, was God from God— at least in Egypt—was Lord, was savior of the world, was redeemer, was liberator, and you ask yourself, or make the mistake of asking a classicist, “Did those millions of people who saw, who read those texts, who could read, saw those inscriptions, looked at those images, saw those structures, did they all take it literally or did they take it metaphorically?” The honest answer must be, “I do not have the faintest idea, nor does anyone else.” But I do know that they took it operationally, they took it functionally, they took it programmatically. To say I believe in the divinity of Caesar meant I am getting with the program, I’m supporting Roman imperialism. If I were certain that all of that was taken literally, no question, then I might be more certain about how to read Christian, anti-Caesarian theology. That is the issue for me. How do we know, know enough to demand of our people, in the name of faith, that everything must be taken literally as distinct from metaphorically? ‘What I am suggesting is that whether you take it literally or whether you take it metaphorically, you must take it programmatically. And that means you must be able to spell out in detail what is the program of the divine Christ as distinct in great detail from the program of the divine Caesar. That is the first-century question. The first-century question is not “Do you think Jesus is Lord?” It is “Do you think Caesar or Jesus is Lord?” And when you say, “Jesus is Lord” you have just committed high treason. I would even want to spell out the program a little bit. The Roman program, if you think about it as a bumper sticker on their chariots, would be, “First victory, then peace.” First victory, then peace. Or piety, then war, then victory, then peace, to give it a fuller bumper sticker. I think the opposite program coming from Jesus, Paul, and the New Testament is “First justice, then peace.” Or better: “Covenant, nonviolence, justice, and peace?’ 13 My conclusion: I see now two routes before us. We can argue about mode: Is the resurrection to be taken literally or figuratively? Is it maybe, as Tom has suggested, a literal resurrection for Jesus, metaphorical for Christians, literal again for everyone? Or might it be metaphorical for Jesus, literal now for everyone who is a Christian,

10

again metaphorical at the end? We can go on debating that. It seems to me that we have been debating it for two hundred years, and we have reached an impasse; nobody is persuading anyone else about it that I can see. So, I want to make this suggestion tonight: if you want to debate mode, what has to be taken literally, what has to be taken metaphorically, it is a perfectly valid debate. But there is something else: the question of meaning. I would like to ask anyone who says “literally” to spell out exactly what is the meaning of that? That is, what are the implications, how does it work out, how does it change the world, how do we participate in a new creation? Tell me that from your literal reading. I would try, and anyone who takes it metaphorically, to spell out the implications from a metaphorical reading. I’m not saying that whether you take the resurrection literally or metaphorically is not important. I’m not even saying bracket it. I’m saying give me the meaning that comes from a literal reading of this. Give me a reading that comes from a metaphorical reading of this. Could it be that we might overlap tremendously in the field of meaning, where we will not agree at all in the field of mode? My point is not that mode is not important, that it doesn’t make any difference what you believe but how you act. That is not what I am saying. I’m saying that I don’t want any longer just to argue about the beginning and the end, the past and the future. I want to think about the present. I want really to know how we are going to take back God’s world from the thugs. Thank you.

11

DIALOGUE N. T. Wright and John Dominic Crossan 1 Wright: Dom and I have had this conversation before, but I think it is important that we have it as part of this discussion here: these blessed words literal and metaphorical. Literal and metaphorical are words which describe the way words refer to things. Often, we use literal and metaphorical when actually we mean “concrete” and “abstract.” I think we are in danger in talking about mode if we use which then leaves you without the groundwork for dealing with the bodily realities of martyrdom, Caesar’s world, and all the rest of it. In other words, is not your political agenda going to push you ultimately to saying that there really was an empty tomb on Easter morning? I didn’t intend that we should get there so soon, but since we have... 2 Crossan: No, it wouldn’t, but let me put it this way: if all Christians in the world today were perfectly happy with a literal empty tomb and everything literal, a body coming out which you could see, everything like that, I don’t think I’d care enough to even raise the issue. It is that I know thousands of Christians for whom the bodily resurrection is equated with the resurrection. They’ve—how would I put it—reduced it to “Do you or do you not believe that Jesus came bodily out of the tomb?” and then that means that a camera could have picked up Jesus, as it were. And that’s all they want to talk about. If they take resurrection to mean just that, then they say I can’t be a Christian. I think that is awful. I am ready to say that if you are a Christian then you must believe in the resurrection. If they ask literally or metaphorically? I would say, tell me what you mean by “literally”; tell me what you mean by “metaphorically~’ That’s the language I would use. I wouldn’t speak of concrete or abstract. I really wouldn’t, Tom. Because it does point to something concrete in the world—changing the world, not just changing me subjectively. 3 Wright: It’s very interesting that we have shifted already to arguing from the way we want the world to be to statements about what we think ought to have happened or might have happened in the past. Can I just proceed with another question and then you can come back to me with some questions of your own, but can we go back to the historical ones because I’m not sure that in our various dialogues in the last year or two we have gotten very far with this? I’m fascinated by that extra mutation, and I think if I were rewriting the book, that I would want to add a seventh mutation, the one that you insisted on, me collaborative eschatology which seems to me exactly right, and that’s exactly what Paul is talking about again and again. So, thank you for that; you’ll get the footnote in the second edition, at least. Actually, think that is very important. We might come back to it again. But how, then, do you explain all those mutations? I think you agree mutations took place. You’ve highlighted one which I highlighted as well, the splitting of the event into two. And then

12

you’ve introduced this new one, collaborative eschatology. ‘What precipitated those? And, if I can just sharpen that up, what people believe about what happens at or after death goes very deep in any culture. People may change some beliefs about some things, but when it comes to burying Mom or Dad, they want to do it the way the family has always done it. So, something happened which caused all those Christians from very different backgrounds to transform the beliefs that their cultures had given them into this remarkable new shape. How do you explain that? 4 Crossan: Okay. Your explanation is, empty tomb necessary and sufficient, right? 5 Wright: No, we’ve got another stage in between. My explanation is they all really did believe that Jesus was bodily raised from the dead. That’s the explanation of the mutations. Then we have to ask, “Why did they believe that?” And then.. . but we can’t short-circuit that. 6 Crossan: No, no. I’m following your argument. I think it is perfectly valid. I did notice you used the term really rather than literally— but, I’m not quibbling. I’m not quibbling, because if you ask me, “Do I think something really happened?” Yes! Yes! If you confuse—I’m not saying you’re doing this—if one confuses literal and real, then one has succumbed to the Enlightenment, as far as I’m concerned. 7 Wright: The word real is one of the slipperiest ones in modern English, but... 8 Crossan: And it’s fair enough because it is a slippery one. To answer your question, though—if I’m looking at this as a historian and I’m saying, “How can they come up with this?”—the first half of your book shows that this is an extraordinary mutation; it’s not just some nice evolution, and the next step, and anyone would have gotten there. No, it’s an extraordinary mutation. I think you are absolutely right there. I think, for me, it’s very, very important that the announcement of the historical Jesus—the Jesus of the Gospels, let’s put it that way—as I understand his announcement, is not that the kingdom is imminent, it is that the kingdom has already begun. And when he sends people out, he’s telling them to cooperate; he’s already in a cooperative eschatology. Now I think these people have experienced that; they have experienced the power of the kingdom. Then there’s the terrible shock of the crucifixion. Now what has to happen next is that plus the risen apparitions. I am convinced as a fact that they had apparitions. How you explain that is a separate issue, but it happened; they are not making it up; it’s not hallucinations. My statement is that the stories in the Gospels, as I’ve argued, are primarily interested in who’s in charge and had an apparition. But that presumes an apparition, even if I claim, as I would, that Mark’s tomb story is made up. I think I’m with you, apparitions happened. But I

13

think, apparitions plus the experience of “the kingdom is already here”; that’s my explanation of those two things. With regard to the empty tomb, honestly I would say, plus or minus, it’s not worth it. I don’t mind. Historically, I’m not sure about it because I think Mark created it, but it’s not something I would argue. I concede it. 9 Wright: Okay, this is extremely interesting, because I agree with you that Jesus’ proclamation of the kingdom and their awareness of the power of God through the work and preaching of Jesus is one of the preconditions for the eventual overall interpretation at which they arrived. I don’t myself think that those by themselves would be sufficient to generate anyone saying he’s been raised from the dead when he hadn’t been. I mean, I’ve explored elsewhere an imaginary scenario supposing in 70 G.E. at Titus’s triumph in Jerusalem when Simon Bar-Giora was brought into the forum and then killed the way they did (they killed the enemy king at the end of the great triumph). Supposing, three or four days later, some lucky Jew who managed to escape with some friends and be hiding out somewhere saying, “You know, I think Simon really was the Messiah. You know, we felt God’s power at work when he was leading us. I really think he was and is God’s Anointed One.” His friends would say, “You must be crazy. The Romans caught him; they killed him, just like they always do. You know perfectly well what that means. It means he couldn’t possibly be the Messiah, because we all know that when the pagans execute somebody—celebrating their triumph over him—that shows that he couldn’t have been the Messiah?’ So, without something happening next, all of that stuff goes down the tubes. I think that scene in Luke 24, whatever you say about the overall historicity of it, is absolutely spot-on in terms of first-century Jewish perceptions: “We had hoped that he would be the One to redeem Israel?’ but the implication is, we know that the fact that they killed him shows that he can’t have been. Without something to reverse that, they would say, “We’ve just been living in a wonderful dream, but now it’s all over and we’ve woken up to the normal imperial reality?’ 10 Crossan: But the something that I’m insisting on, at that point, is that they did have visions. I am, I really am. Otherwise I would not be able to understand it. I don’t know how you make the jump without that. Whether it’s possible to have taken Jesus’ proclamation that the kingdom had already started and bypass the resurrection, I don’t know. I don’t know. But, as far as I’m concerned, incarnation comes first. 11 Wright: Yes, I’ve heard you say that before, and in a sense, theologically, I agree with you, though I don’t think myself that the disciples believed in the incarnation, as later Christian theology has seen it, until they put the whole package together after the resurrection, though they were puzzled by some things. But I don’t see them actually making some kind of an implicit, trinitarian or proto-trinitarian statement. That would be a wonderful solution, wouldn’t it?

14

Headlines in the newspaper next week: “Crossan believes that the incarnation was there even during the period of Jesus’ lifetime.” That would be wonderfully revolutionary. 12 Crossan: Let me probe the counterfactual for a moment. I think you would agree Jesus’ proclamation is not “the kingdom is coming soon’ and then comes the resurrection, and, “Ah, it started!” That’s not what I am saying, at least. I think Jesus is saying, “In my life and in your cooperation with it, the kingdom has already started.” And I’m quite willing to leave it as possible that it’s going to be over very soon. I’m not going to get into that one. Well, giant mutations are hard to swallow. But let’s imagine that’s what’s happening in Galilee. The kingdom has already started. What reason would there be that that might not have continued? I know it’s counterfactual, but just to make us think of it. 13 Wright: What reason would there be that the kingdom wouldn’t have just continued? Because, I think, the kingdom for them, as we see from Josephus again, from his account of the rebellions around the time of Jesus’ birth, the “kingdom of God” was bound up with actual events in saying, “We don’t want Caesar ruling over us; we don’t want Herod ruling over us; we don’t want Caiaphas and his crew ruling over us, either. We want only God to be King’ And, if the Romans kill your Messiah, it’s evidence that God just hasn’t done it yet, however good it felt when you were walking around with Jesus, healing the sick and sharing open commensality and so on. So, I really think the crucifixion is the denial of that, without something else.

Let me press you on the apparitions, you see, because I don’t know if you’ve changed your view, but in one of your books, at least, and I’ve heard you say it as well, you say that we are actually all hard-wired to have visions of people after they die. And I’ve heard you there to be aligning yourself with the argument that Gerd Lüdemann has put out, that in fact, and this is a well-known phenomenon in the ancient and in the modern world, that after someone you love has died, sometimes even before you know they have died, you can actually see them in the room with you and it’s very real and very clear. Now, first I want to know, is that your argument, because if so, presumably plenty of other people in the ancient world had visions of people after they died, and that doesn’t mean they’re alive again—it means they’re dead. That’s the point. The ancient pagan writers were very clear about that. That’s one of the reasons that you have these meals with the dead at the tomb, not to bring them back again, but actually as a way of making sure that Uncle Joe ain’t coming back again. That’s how those things function. So that you wouldn’t then say—this is why Greg Riley is completely wrong in Resurrection Reconsidered—you wouldn’t then say, well, this is basically the same thing as somebody being 15

alive again. That’s precisely what it isn’t. So let’s get to that one first. 14 Crossan: If I could imagine all sorts of modern medical technology on a person having a vision of the risen Lord, and somebody having a vision of a beloved person who has, say, died tragically, suddenly—I would imagine a horrible thing, you go to work on 9-11 and are never heard of again—I would think those visions are exactly the same in terms of what I might call “psychological anthropology?’ But, it is what is there before and what has come afterwards that’s going to make all the difference, if what is there before is your experience of Jesus. Or even if your knowledge of Jesus is bad enough that you want to persecute the followers, like Paul, you already know enough that’s going to change it. And the result afterwards will change it. For example, everyone in the early church had a magnificent vision of Jesus, and they all said, “Oh, good! Ah-h, it’s all right’ and then went back to fishing, for example. 15 Wright:

Which they did, according to John 21.

16 Crossan: Right. That would not be the same vision. In other words, the difference, for me, is in the preparation, if you will, and the result. 17 Wright:

Yes, but...

18 Crossan:

That does make a difference.

19 Wright: Yes, but my problem then is, if people having visions of recently dead people was as well-known as you and others have suggested, then they would simply have said that he’s with God, that he’s alive in some other sense. They would have said what Wisdom of Solomon 3 says about the martyrs: the souls of the righteous are in the hands of God. Or what they said about the Maccabean martyrs, as you know: they are great martyrs, and we honor them, and we respect their memory, and we will visit their graves and pay respect to their graves, but they haven’t been raised from the dead yet; they will be raised from the dead in the future. Indeed, Steve Patterson, in his book on Jesus, argued that it began with people saying Jesus, like a martyr, will be raised from the dead and that they gradually transposed that into He’s already been raised from the dead.3 You’re not saying that, but I wonder how, then, the argument sticks, because you see it with Acts 12 when Peter gets out of jail, surprisingly, and comes and knocks on the door and this wonderful scene with the little maid, Rhoda, who hears Peter’s voice and forgets to open the door because she’s so excited and comes and tells them. And they say, “It must be his angel.” Now that’s regular Jewish language for, “We are having one of those postmortem visitations.” 20 Crossan:

Right.

21 Wright: And that doesn’t mean, “Wow, Peter is alive again from the dead.” It means, “They’ve just killed Peter and presumably tomorrow we will go to the prison, get his body, and bury it.”

16

22 Crossan: All right. But. . . if, for example, they had said—let us say they had apparitions, let’s say they were unique, ontologically unique, they’re not like anything that had ever happened in the whole history of the world—I can only get from that to exaltation, to the Philippians hymn, maybe, that Jesus now is with God, Jesus sits at the right hand of God, Jesus is lord of the universe, but you haven’t yet got to resurrection, because resurrection means a whole new mutation. 23 Wright: But if you simply have apparitions without an empty tomb, they would say, “he’s with God,’ he maybe even in some sense ~s exalted, though only in the same way as the martyrs are. If you have an empty tomb and something’s happened to the body, and then if the apparitions actually are not just apparitions, such as one has if somebody you love has just died, but actually involve some extraordinary physical things. You know, according to Luke 24, there must be a broken loaf lying on the table somewhere which they didn’t break— somebody did that—and so it’s not just eating broiled fish. There’s a bunch of physical phenomena going on, and this is where the stories are so odd, as well as these kind of paraphysical phenomena—I don’t think anyone could have made up these stories, actually, I think they’re so bizarre—and that’s part of the point. Those are the sorts of things that, when coupled with the apparitions, the physical evidences, of which the empty tomb is the first example, make me say and, I think, made them say, this isn’t just an ordinary apparition, and it isn’t just exaltation; it really is resurrection. And, obviously, they weren’t expecting resurrection. That’s the key thing. 24 Crossan: I can’t see it, Tom. And it’s not necessarily that for any reason I would resist it. I can’t see that the empty tomb alone—and let’s not imagine anyone stealing [the body] or anything like that— and risen apparitions, risen visions: I can see that getting them to exaltation, I really can (I think it is almost inevitable), but I cannot see it getting to resurrection. Let me put it this way: I think the two halves of your book magnificently strain against one another; the more you insist on the extraordinary nature of this mutation—which I’m with you all the way on that—the more you need a bigger explanation than even empty tomb or apparitions, no matter how literally you take them. It gets you to exaltation without resurrection. 25 Wright: Well, I don’t understand why you can’t get to resurrection if you have an empty tomb and somebody is clearly there, palpably alive again, inviting you to touch him, and eating broiled fish. 26 Crossan: Can I focus on that to be clear? But, you see, if everyone was expecting the resurrection to split into a one and a many, then it would be perfectly clear, “This is the one we’ve been waiting for.” But you’ve proved conclusively in your book that the Pharisaic expectation was of a general resurrection, maybe even tomorrow. But now the leap that says this is the beginning of the resurrection happens, which means that now we must think of the resurrection

17

involving a time span. 27 Wright: I think I can get a razor blade here between what you think I’m thinking and what I think I’m thinking. Take the example of one of the brigands crucified alongside Jesus: What if he had, two or three days later, been found walking around again, appearing to people, and his tomb was found to be empty? I think that people certainly would have said the world is an extremely strange place, we haven’t a clue what is going on. Let’s put it like this: they wouldn’t have said, “He’s the second person of the Trinity; he’s the Son of God, he’s the Messiah’ because of what they knew about his former life, and that’s what makes the difference in the interpretation of the event. I think what I’m saying is this—and it’s kind of a linguistic slipperiness, between saying the resurrection, which from that point of view is an interpretation of the event, and saying what T think I’m wanting to say—they see that here is somebody who was genuinely dead, and was dead for a short period, at least, and is now in phase two of a postmortem existence. And that phase two is a new embodiment that has used up the old body in some way or other. Now I think that is the conclusion that they came to. Then, if you like, and here I’m trying to find a way of agreeing with what I hear you saying, then calling that the Resurrection, with a capital R, is an interpretative leap. But what I want to hold out for and what I would press you back to is, would they not think that this person has had happen to him that of which those Jewish traditions spoke, which spoke of a two-stage postmortem existence of which the second stage is a newly transformed embodiment? Could they not have reached that conclusion from empty tomb plus appearances—they couldn’t have reached it from appearances alone, and they wouldn’t have reached it from empty tomb alone. I think they would have just concluded grave robbery; there were plenty of examples of that. It’s the two together that makes them say this odd event, a two-stage postmortem existence of which the second stage is re-embodiment, has happened. Then I agree with you because of what they know about Jesus and because of the Jewish world they’re living in, they call it the Resurrection, with a capital R. Does that make sense? 28 Crossan: It does, but what I suppose I don’t understand is why it would not be simpler, honestly, to say that it would involve three things. Don’t give an inch on the empty tomb, if you want, and the risen apparitions as unique. Why not, also, the life of Jesus? That is what I didn’t understand in your book. I thought it would not at all weaken your argument. I thought it would strengthen your argument. 29 Wright: It could have strengthened the argument. You know the “setting in life” of my book was that it started out life as the last chapter of Jesus and the Victory of God, and that it sort of grew, so it had to have a book to itself. So, I was kind of presupposing all that and that it is precisely the aliveness after a period of being dead of this man who had announced the kingdom, feasted with sinners,

18

healed the lepers, and so on, and had been crucified as a Messiah— in other words, had been deemed to be a failed Messiah. So, it’s the aliveness after a period of being dead of this man who did these things and said these things. I’ve no problem with that. I just didn’t say it in this book because I had said quite a lot about it in the previous one. 30 Crossan: I’m pressing harder on that. It’s not simply of this man that we knew all about. It’s of this man who had already said, and who had helped us experience that, the kingdom—that’s Jesus’ language—had already started. So, they were already primed to understand that it’s not just the great clean-up that’s in the future, imminently in the future. It has begun. Now they know that already. So, it’s the language of Jesus that I really find isomorphic with the language of resurrection. 31 Wright: I don’t find them isomorphic. And I think we have to recognize that there are other Jewish groups in roughly the same period, give or take two hundred years, who also have inaugurated eschatologies about the kingdom having really begun, secretly with them or whatever, and whose hopes then get shattered. Qumran had an inaugurated eschatology. It wasn’t a resurrection eschatology because nobody thought the Teacher of Righteousness had been raised from the dead, at least I don’t think they did. But they did believe that God had reestablished the covenant with them. And then, my favorite example, when Bar-Kochba in 132 announced his rebellion with the backing of Rabbi Akiba, they even struck coins with the year 1 on them. It’s like the French revolutionaries: they restarted the calendar. And there is, very interestingly, a three-year period, 132 to 135, when they mint coins, year 1, year 2, year 3. They really believe that the kingdom has arrived. They’ve still got to fight the decisive battle, they’ve still got to rebuild the temple, so BarKochba has the temple on his coins as a sign of what he intends to do. And then, 135, Rome comes—game over. And nobody says, in 136, “Actually, we experienced the kingdom with Bar-Kochba and we’re now carrying it on?’ Instead, you have a rabbi saying, “It’s time to give up all this kingdom language because it just gets you into trouble.” Which it does. And it should. 32 Crossan: To be fair to the counterfactuals of history, if in that time in the middle of the Bar-Kochba revolt, the Celts—let’s give it to the Celts—had decided to invade on all fronts, and if Rome finally gave back and said, you can have your own country, just send back a little taxation; run your own country again. Then he probably would then have been proclaimed the Messiah. But I don’t want to go into that. Let me put it this way... 33 Wright:

An Irish Messiah who saved the world.

34 Crossan:

Well, yes; people are weird about their messiahs. . . . Let

19

me put it as a slightly different question. Is there any way that, using the metaphor used before, we could leave the bookends and talk about the library? How do we take seriously the duty of Christians? Because as I would understand Paul talking to, for example, an open-minded, pre-Enlightenment pagan who says, “Well, Paul, you’re a nice guy, I’m willing to believe your word that Jesus is bodily up there. Julius Caesar is up there in spirit, Jesus is up there bodily—that surprises me—but that’s OK now?’ You would have to concede that could be possible, not for Arian-like Platonists, but for the ordinary popular person ~~‘ho lives in the pre-Enlightenment culture. Their question is going :o be, “So what, Paul?” or “What’s going on?” And Paul is going to say, Come and see how we live?’ That’s what I wanted to get to. How do you persuade—persuade, not prove—an open-minded pagan who is not going to get into your post-Enlightenment, “Well, I don’t think that could happen” mindset? I agree with you that most philosophers are not going to think up bodily resurrection. I think that in popular culture—I taught undergraduates for twenty-six years—the Enlightenment never “took?’ It’s a lovely idea; it just didn’t work. So, I’m trying to imagine, now, the pre-Enlightenment; I really would like to try and get back to what’s our responsibility for a new creation. Collaborative eschaton? 35 Wright: I’m totally with you on what I think you’re driving at there. Let me just challenge one of the premises, when you talk about Jesus being “bodily up there” and Caesar being “spiritually up there?’ Part of the point of the resurrection in the New Testament, as I understand it, is not that Jesus died and was bodily raised to heaven. I heard a priest say that in a sermon the other day, and I shuddered. That’s precisely not what’s going on. The collapsing of resurrection and ascension into one another in a lot of popular New Testament scholarship, I think, just misses the point entirely. You can’t actually do that with Philippians 2 and so on. Paul sometimes makes one point, sometimes the other, sometimes both, but he knows the difference. As incidentally, despite a whole chorus of scholarship, does John. Otherwise, why in John 20 do you have that very strange thing of the risen Christ saying, “Don’t touch me because I have not yet ascended”? In other words, John knows perfectly well that there’s a difference between resurrection and ascension, and you can’t simply collapse it with the Johannine language of glory, as people often do. So, I’m a little worried about that. But yes, for me, the key text is 1 Corinthians 15:58, where, at the end of Paul’s great chapter on the resurrection, he does not say, therefore, sit back and relax because there’s this wonderful future ahead of you. He says, “Therefore, be steadfast, immoveable, always abounding in the work of the Lord, because you know that in the Lord your labor is not in vain.” And it took me a long time before I realized why that logically goes with the chapter on resurrection. It means precisely because if there is bodily resurrection, if there is the renewal of the cosmos of the creation, a la

20

Romans 8, a la Revelation 21 and 22, it means that what we do in the present by way of justice and mercy and grace and forgiveness and healing and liberation and all the rest of it, all that is done in the name of Christ and in the power of the Spirit, will not be lost but will be part of the eventual kingdom that God will make. In other words, there is continuity as well as discontinuity. And it is precisely that continuity which I see as modeled, paradigmed—my goodness, I am using a noun as a verb; that’s a very American thing to do— in the bodily resurrection of Jesus, where you have continuity, not just the discontinuity of a body moldering in a tomb with the soul going marching on. So it is precisely because I share that that I love the phrase, collaborative eschatology. You know, Oscar Wilde said to somebody, “I wish I had said that~’ and the answer was, “You will, Oscar; you will.” 36 Crossan: He was Irish. Let me raise this as almost a pastoral problem. As a bishop, you must have Christians for whom the resurrection has been reduced to “Do you or do you not believe that Jesus came bodily out of the tomb, in the crudest sense of the word?” Period. And, for whom, the answer is, “No, or I’m not sure I’m a Christian because I can’t believe that.” Is there any way of getting past that? I mean, I meant what I said if everyone took it for granted that, of course, this was all literal, I would say, let’s get on with what we are supposed to be doing then. 37 Wright: I take the point. I have to say I wish Anglican Christians in the Church of England were as concerned about the question of the bodily resurrection as you and I are, from one way or another. But that’s a whole other problem. I agree that a lot of Christians have shrunk the meaning of Easter to, “Do you or don’t you believe that God did this particular, spectacular miracle?”—as one example, albeit, the supreme one, of God the great, supernatural intervener. And I hope you know from my writings that I simply don’t see the world and God and Jesus like that. I don’t like that language of intervention because I think it buys into a deistic framework of a God outside the process who occasionally reaches in and does things. And, likewise, I don’t think that resurrection must be believed because it is the supreme example of believing something in the Bible even when it tells you some extraordinary things. Resurrection is, if it’s anything, and must be, the center of the Christian worldview, and the center of a Christian epistemology. We may come back to that tomorrow. But let me say, I think you can get to the results you want by taking more seriously than I think you do the early Christian, particularly the Pauline, language of Jesus as the incorporative Messiah, the king who sums up his people in himself, so that what happens to the king happens to them. It is by that means that I can bring on board all of that incorporative thing. Calvin said, Jesus Christ did not ascend into heaven in a private

21

capacity. That’s a good piece of reformed theology. He goes there with his people. And all those Greek Orthodox icons. . . . I went into an icon shop on one of the Greek islands once, and said, “I want an icon of the resurrection.” And all the icons of the resurrection, as you well know, are of Jesus leading up Adam and Eve out of the tomb. Now that is the incorporative Messiahship which I see there, and I agree with what you implicitly said that that’s probably underneath that very odd passage in Matthew 27, though I still don’t claim to know exactly what that’s about. So, I think you can get that “harrowing of hell’ and I think Paul already has it by implication. I didn’t use that phrase, but I think it’s there within the incorporative Messiahship, that when God vindicates Jesus, that is the vindication of all God’s people. The model for that in the Old Testament is David fighting Goliath. Here you’ve got the Israelites, here you’ve got the Philistines, here is one man fighting one man, but when David defeats Goliath, that actually means that Israel has defeated the Philistines. They have to do the mopping up operations afterwards, but it’s basically “game over.” That’s the image of the king, the Davidic king, in whom God’s people are summed up. And when God vindicates him, it isn’t just a pat on the back for this one man for a job well done, and now that’s over. It’s rather, and this is why I said at the beginning, certainly in John 20, but I think in the other Gospels as well, the point of Easter in the Gospels is that new creation has begun and we’ve got a job to do. And I actually think that you and I are now on the same page on that. It’s just that I think what you want to say would be much better grounded theologically and actually if God literally, concretely, really, in that sense, actually did it. 38 Crossan: Well, a couple of things. First of all, when you say, “the world I want’ it’s the world they want. It happens to be also the world I want. It’s the world that Jesus wants. It’s the world that Paul wants. Secondly, I don’t know when I go back into a pre-Enlightenment world, this is really what’s rock bottom for me; it’s not post-Enlightenment, because, well, I’m Irish; we never had an Enlightenment. We skipped that. 39 Wright:

You said it.

40 Crossan: Well, we didn’t. We were busy with other things, as you know. I tease Tom that we had the British and we found them most enlightening. 41 Wright:

You weren’t the only people who did.

42 Crossan: But my point is, when you go back into a pre-Enlightenment world, where wonders, even the bodily resurrection of one person, at least, I think, in popular culture in the Roman world, that would be a possible wonder, but with no implications unless you…

22

43 Wright: Toward the end of the book I envisaged a Roman soldier hearing in the mid-60s a plausible-sounding story: “Hey, there’s lots of us who really believed this and who saw him” and so on. The categories that that Roman soldier might have would be totally un-Jewish. He wouldn’t know about the resurrection. What he might think would be like what some of them thought in the early 70s about a Nero Redivivus. He was such a great guy; maybe he didn’t actually die; maybe he’ll be back someday. And that owed nothing, as far as we know, to any ideas about Judaism or Christianity. It was simply, Nero made such an impact on the troops that they really thought he might be back. So, I can easily imagine that somebody might hear it in that way. That presumably is why, from very, very early on, the early apostolic creed, if you like, 1 Corinthians 15:3 and following, says, Christ died for our sins in accordance with the scriptures and was raised on the third day, in accordance with scripture. In other words, these are the most bizarre events that have ever happened in the history of the world. If you want to know what they mean, go and read the Bible. But I don’t think you can do it the other way and say that it’s simply because they started reading the Bible that they then came up with this, “Hey, maybe he’s been raised from the dead.” Because my point is, had they done that, the resurrection narratives would have been so fused with scripture, like the crucifixion narratives are. And, they would have done it quite differently, because with Daniel 12 in their heads, they would certainly have had the risen Jesus shining like a star, which he doesn’t. 44 Crossan: We’re not disagreeing on that. To make it clear, I do not think you can get anywhere without “It began with Jesus.” I get a bit nervous if somebody says the new creation began at the resurrection. I think, no, the new creation began with Jesus saying, if you will, but more importantly living out “the kingdom of God has arrived.” I think that’s when it began. Now I don’t find that in any contradiction with Paul saying, somebody saying, it has begun with the resurrection. But that’s why you say “isomorphic.” 45 Wright: I’m happy with that. That there’s an early inauguration and then there’s kind of a middle inauguration. That’s not a problem. 46 Crossan: That’s a different theological way of explaining what happened. What I’m trying to imagine is the ordinary people of the Roman empire, when they saw all this stuff about a divine Caesar, and all the rest of it. And I think it’s shocking to a lot of people to know that before Jesus ever existed, the titles that we think are peculiarly Christian, that we kind of invented, were the popular discourse to the Roman Empire. 47 Wright:

They’re on coins.

48 Crossan: They are on all the coins. It was the only mass medium of antiquity. I’m trying to imagine, let’s say, some people took that 100 percent literally. Some other people, I’m sure, took it

23

metaphorically. Some other people, who might have been planning an assassination, if they got a chance, didn’t believe in it. Now if I take that spectrum, from 100 percent literal to 100 percent metaphorical, and I want to say, OK, with Jesus, let us say 100 percent metaphorical or 100 percent literal. Wherever you take it, if you take the Jesus 100 percent literal and the Caesar, any way you take it you are committing high treason. That’s what I want to insist on, rather than getting into an argument of is it literal or is it metaphorical? I can do that argument. We’ve spent most of our time, actually, doing it. That’s what scares me a little bit, because we’ve been doing it for two hundred years. I don’t see much evidence of it changing people. And, it seems to me that it’s the great magnificent cop-out. Let’s discuss that and not get into trouble by putting it into practice, because you can get yourself crucified doing that stuff. So, I think I’m not saying that invalidates it, but at least could we spend as much time, not talking to anyone in particular, could we spend as much time talking about putting the resurrection of Jesus, the general resurrection, into practice as at least equal time for in between, because now it’s stretching. 49 Wright: I’m totally with you on that. It’s just that, to repeat, I do think that because God made a good world, and I’m totally with you on this business of God saying, “Good, good, good, very good’ that is the foundation of all Jewish and Christian theology and therefore God cannot in the end, if he is a just God, and if he cares about this good world that he’s made, just throw it in the trash and rescue everyone off to a different place entirely. I think we’re completely on the same page there and together, over against a great many people in various different Christian traditions around the place. But, for me, it is that entire picture which then sustains me from the other end, from the history, if you like, in believing that God actually did precisely that for Jesus and did not leave his body in the tomb to suffer corruption. And because I believe that Jesus, as Messiah, was representing his people and through that representation was, as it were, the focal point of the entire cosmos, and there I’m with Paul in Colossians 1, and so on, then I believe that in his Easter moment, the whole cosmos in a sense, a shock wave ran through it. Paul says in Colossians 1:23 that this gospel has already ~en preached to every creature under heaven. Now you could say that’s like a sort of “harrowing of hell,” but with Easter, something has happened to the cosmos. Now, if it actually happened, then a door has been opened through which we can go towards that kingdom of God which is over against the kingdom of Caesar. I totally agree with you that the Enlightenment, both the rightwing Enlightenment and the left-wing Enlightenment, has ignored that open door and used the resurrection quite spuriously, in my view, as a way of saying, “Therefore, there is a heaven and that’s what matters rather than earth.” And I think there we are actually in full agreement.

24

50 Crossan:

Yes. Thank you.

25